College Football Gets a Long Overdue Makeover

Any fan of college football has a distinct opinion on the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) and the postseason process that comes along with it.  For the most part, people have been complaining and speaking up in favor of revamping the entire selection process to give more teams a crack at hoisting the all-too-important Coaches’ Trophy at years end.

Well some of those prayers have been answered.  After 143 seasons, countless controversies and many snubbed teams later, it seems major college football will finally have a playoff to determine its national champion.  News broke this week that the idea would be recommended by the FBS (Football Subdivision) commissioners to the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee and the process will be up for vote very soon.
The official recommendation will be for the implementation of a 4-team playoff which could be put into place as early as the 2014 season.  Some of the current BCS selection charm will still be there (you didn’t honestly think you weren’t getting away without some platform for controversy, did you?).  According to sources close to the deliberations, a committee will be set up to be in charge of choosing the 4 teams that will partake in the playoff.  How exactly that committee will be chosen and what types of individuals will make up the committee is still yet to be determined.

Once the four teams are chosen, they will be seeded and pitted against each other (1 v 4, 2 v 3) and put into one of the current BCS Bowl games (Orange, Sugar, Rose and Fiesta) and those will serve as the semifinals.  The winners will face off in the true National Championship game and will have its host decided by bidding between cities.

Now that all the details have been ironed out, let’s talk about what exactly this means for the college football world.

I have been watching college football casually for years now and bowl season has been one of my favorite times of the sporting year.  Up until 2008, I knew and understood the frustration that many fans had about the BCS selection system, but I never really had a concrete stance on what I wanted to be changed.  That all changed when Utah  got snubbed beyond belief and got robbed of its chance to face off against then #1 Oklahoma  for the crystal trophy.  I mean come on, Utah was the ONLY undefeated team in the country and they get left out of the big game.  Now, let’s look at how many teams passed over them in the final BCS rankings.  Not one, not two, not three, not four but five (in my best LeBron James voice), yes, five one-loss teams ended up in front of Utah in the final BCS rankings.

Ever since Utah’s snubbing in ’09, it seems like there is always that one team that had a legitimate claim to be in the big game, but got left out for one reason or another (usually money is behind it).  In 2010, it was both Cincinnati and TCU who both were undefeated, yet left out of the game.  In 2011, it was TCU, and last year a majority of people thought Oklahoma State deserved a right to be in the National Championship.
I think many of those who criticized the current BCS system would agree with me in saying that it is a definite improvement from the current model.  Having teams battle it out for true supremacy seems to be the way the public have wanted it for years.  This may not be a perfect solution, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.  There will still be those teams sitting at #5 who think they deserve a shot.  But as long as we don’t have five undefeated teams all vying for a championship bid, it will at least be a loss that keeps a team out, not what conference they come from.

Someone is always going to think they got the short end of the stick. The media will find a way to make it certain that the public thinks a team got snubbed for apparently no reason, but as far as I am concerned, this is a vast improvement over the current model and should put to bed at least some of the controversies that the current model seemed to produce every year.

Article by: Alexander Herd

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